The personal computer in 1982

I just read James Fallows’s July 1982 Atlantic Article, “Living with a Computer.” This captures the approximate period when computers began to evolve from being the domain of hobbyists and technologists to being tools for ordinary folks, at least ordinary folks who had a few thousand dollars to invest. Fallows was apparently a very early adopter, spending some $4000 (excluding later upgrades) on a system that would allow him to write words that would appear on a screen, save a few thousand words at once, and even print. In this era, storage of data is typically on 5 1/4- or 8-inch floppy disks. Unreliable tape drives are becoming obsolete, and hard drives (“from two or three on up to several dozen megabytes”!), though available, are an expensive luxury. Fallows calls the hard drive a “hard disk.” There is one brief reference to “computer mail.” The standard operating system is made by a company called Digital Research. Fallows uses a discontinued word-processing program called the Electric Pencil. In fact the very computer he had purchased just a couple of years earlier is discontinued, and has no successor. The company is out of business. Along with familiar names like IBM and Apple, the article mentions faded names like Atari and Commodore, and others than few will remember—Osborne, for example, which had recently produced the first successful portable (23 pounds) computer. The article is a stark reminder that the early electronics-product adopter runs a high risk of paying a lot for a product that may become not only obsolete, but not forward compatible. Fallows writes: “The microcomputer industry these days is like the auto business in 1910.” Clearly, some people bought the equivalent of cars with steam engines. As for Microsoft, it is unmentioned, although the IBM PC, which used MS-DOS, is. Presciently, Fallows writes, “The new [16-bit] machines will require different disk-operating systems, and may therefore inspire another DOS war.”